All posts by Lachlan Hunt

Redesign Needed

General, Personal

I desperately need to redesign this site. The problem is, as my regular readers (or, indeed, anyone looking at the current style) will know, I’m no designer. The current design was done over 2 years ago and was basically haphazardly put together by writing and rewriting the CSS until I had something that looked reasonable at the time. I don’t even have a logo.

So I’d like to ask for some help from my readers. There must be somebody out there with some design skills who would be willing to volunteer their time to draw something up. I don’t need, nor want, any too complex or time consuming, just a nice simple design that’s easy on the eye and easy for me to implement.

I’d also really appreciate a logo. Again, nothing too fancy, just something simple and effective that I could print onto my business cards, which is another thing I need. I keep getting asked for a business card, yet I don’t have any. I really should organise those before Web Directions next month.

So, if you’d like to volunteer your time and skills for this task, leave a comment or contact me privately. If I get a few volunteers, I’m happy for you to either work together to come up with one design or individually to come up with a few different possibilities.

Ski Holiday

Personal

Last week, from July 8 to 16, I was spending a week skiing at Falls Creek in Victoria, along with Noveta (mum), Andrew (dad), Lisa (older sister) and Leah (Lisa’s friend).

Leah, Lisa, Noveta and Andrew posed for a photo in their ski suits.

The first few days had shocking weather: it was so foggy, it was hard to see where we were going as we were recklessly flying down the hill with little regard for our own safety. But, by the middle of the week, it cleared up and left a reasonably good covering of snow.

Except for Andrew, who prefers to stay on the easy green runs, we spent most of our time doing the blue and black runs over near the Scotts and Ruined Castle chair lifts. There was a terrain park over there with various jumps, boxes and rails to challenge (and injure) ourselves on. The most challenging of these was a yellow school bus buried in the snow.

The yellow bus is buried in the snow with a steep ramp leading up behind it for jumping and a downhill ramp at the front for landing. The roof of the bus is covered in a special hard plastic material designed for sliding along on skis or a snow board.

Out of 6 attempts, I successfully completed 3 and stacked the others. Luckily, we made it through with little more than a few minor bruises. Surprisingly, even dad didn’t sustain any injuries as he has in previous years.

We stayed in a lodge called Karelia where we spent the evenings in the outdoor spa and sauna, and in the lounge room socialising with the many other families staying there as well.

The front of the dark brown, wooden, snow covered lodge has 2 flights of stairs leading up to the second floor, where the entrance to the main accommodation area is. The third floor has a long balcony stretching almost the entire width of the bulding, with smaller balcony above on the fourth floor. The signs out front read “Karelia Alpine Lodge Accommodation”, and another reading “J.B.’s Restaurant”, which is a restaurant and bar located on the ground floor.

I liked to play scrabble and various other games with one group of boys (pictured below), from 2 families that had come down together from Brisbane; whom I went out skiing with later in the week.

The boys are seated on a couch in the lodge with their parents standing behind, with myself and one of the boys seated on the floor in front.

From the top left, this is Paul, Kelly, Paul (yes, another one) Kathy, William, Jay, Harry, Mitchell, myself and Sam. There’s also another photo of the boys and I without their parents.

We managed to take some photos and a few short videos of our skiing adventure, which I have compiled into a short video (MPEG-4: high quality (14.1MB) or low quality ( 5.5MB)). Lastly, here’s a nice dashing photograph of myself and Lisa in our ski suits.

Lisa and I are standing on the snow wearing our skis with a ski pole in each hand. I'm on the left wearing a red and black jacket, and black pants with a grey stripe running down the the side of the leg. My black beanie, goggles, and maroon face warmer cover my face. Lisa is on the right wearing a light purple jacket, black pants, a white beanie and a pair of goggles.

WCAG 2.0 Revisited

Accessibility

Joe Clark has kindly responded to some the many questions I raised in my last article. Specifically, he responded to the issues of validation, the baseline, multimedia; abbreviations, jargon and pronunciation, and the WCAG Samurai. I still don’t fully agree with him regarding validity, though I fully understand and accept his point of view. He has satisfactorily responded to the issues regarding multimedia and full-text alternatives, but I still have some questions about the baseline. Before I discuss these issues further, there’s just one thing I’d like to clear up.

Apology

Joe seemed to be quite offended by one small statement I made at the beginning: “… his movement against the WCAG Working Group.” As he first commented in my article and then later published on his blog, he’s not against the whole working group and I’d like to apologise for suggesting that he was.

However, I’m not sure why he was so offended by me calling his work, in particular, the WCAG Samurai, a “movement”:

I can barely get the ragtag handful of standardistas in this city together once a month for drinks, let alone run a “movement.”

I thought the WCAG Samurai seemed to fit the definition of “an organized effort by supporters of a common goal”. But regardless of that, I sincerely apologise if this is not the case.

Baseline

[…] If your baseline is set too high, users will have “recourse to complain that your site is inaccessible to them.”

Sadly, no. The user has no say in the baseline designation at all.

I don’t think the user needs to have a say in the baseline designation in order to complain about inaccessibility. Regardless of what the baseline says, if a user can’t access part of the site for whatever reason, there is nothing to stop them complaining to the organisation about it (unless they can’t even access the contact information). Organisations do have some, at least moral, responsibly towards their users and/or customers to produce content that suits their, and their user’s, particular needs.

However, I’d like to get some clarification on what exactly the problem is with the baseline. Joe’s statements about it being possible to make technologies other than plain HTML, CSS and JS accessible are very well known. Such technologies include tagged PDFs and captioned/audio described videos; but all of a sudden there’s something inherently wrong with a baseline statement that says you require support for PDF or support for MPEG and SMIL.

In response to Bruce Maguire’s claims that PDF is inaccessible because:

[…] the resulting document will only be accessible to those people who have the required software and the skills to use it. […] Requiring a user to upgrade to this extent in order to read a standard document is like designing Web content presentation in such a way that most people will have to buy a new computer in order to read it. […] In any case, some of the PDAs used by blind people have no facilities for accessing PDF files”:

Joe Clark wrote:

  • It’s not like PDFs are the only item on your computer for which you require software and skills. You require both of those to surf the web and use HTML pages.
  • “PDAs used by blind people” need to be upgraded if they don’t understand PDF. Essentially, this objection boils down to “if it doesn’t work with what I’ve already got, it doesn’t work, period.” I guess time does not march on for these people. In that case, I hope you’re enjoying HTML 2.0 and your Geocities homepage.

So, I’m confused. I I understand these two points of view correctly, they seem to be conflicting:

  1. You can’t require support for some technologies (i.e. no baselines)
  2. Many technologies can be made accessible and users are just required to have appropriate software. In such cases, you don’t have to make an equivalent in another format (e.g. You don’t necessarily require an HTML alternative for PDF and so-called full-text alternatives for multimedia are apparently a joke)

Any clarification on this issue would greatly appreciated.